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Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

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Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#301

Post by marcosdumay »

varjag wrote: post #104
llm_trw wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Crime stats and polling of people’s perception of crime show this as clearly the wrong approach for instance. The only crime stat you can trust is murder and that's because bodies can't be hidden (easily). Everything else gets swept under the rug. When I wanted to report my car broken into I was hung up on three times because of a poor quality line, which was fine before I told them what I was calling for. When I we…

But this hasn't changed over decades. Policing never was 100% effective and crime was always underreported. Yet if you ask people it's crime getting worse YoY.

And yet, if more people you know report being victims of crime, and the official statistics point to a decrease, the people upthread are happy to declare a decrease.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#302

Post by varjag »

fallingknife wrote: post #186
varjag wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this hasn't changed over decades. Policing never was 100% effective and crime was always underreported. Yet if you ask people it's crime getting worse YoY.

Policing was effective enough that I never had to find someone to unlock a case for me at the store unless I was purchasing something particularly valuable. It was effective enough that you didn't see videos of people looting stores or driving around breaking into cars with impunity.

I don't know, these things were cliche plot devices in 1970s-1980s films and it appears everyone was convinced America headed into Escape From New York future. Naturally, few people had cine/video cameras on them at any time.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#303

Post by lotsoweiners »

Izkata wrote: post #231
lotsoweiners wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try to get an appointment to see a doctor Done this literally dozens of times over the past couple of years for myself, kids, and wife and have never had an issue. Even been offered appointments same or next day. Am I missing something?

Are you urban, suburban, or rural? Something I've been suspicious of for a while now, the farther from the cities the worse it is. Grocery prices, for example, didn't start rising in the city I'm in until a year or more after I started seeing people complaining about it, and a good chunk of them were suburban or rural.

Suburban

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#304

Post by neilwilson »

WalterBright wrote: post #286
doe_eyes wrote: post #35

What I find odd about the article is that it does very little to substantiate its core claim - that the reason the economy is broken are small monopolists-but-not-really-monopolists who are trying to fleece you. It opens with the example of rising construction costs. The only remotely relevant example here is Autodesk, but by the article's own admission, "the cost of these products remains relatively minor". And that…

> the article falls for the classic trap of "rising prices are not inflation, it's ". Inflation is a general price increase caused by an increase in the supply of money relative to the value of goods and services in the economy. It's simple supply & demand - more money chasing the same number of goods => general price increases. Inflation prices never going down is a clear indicator that this is the cause. A general…

It’s not quite that simple.

If I give you a new £20 note and you put it in a drawer then that won’t cause prices to go up.

It’s not money supply that’s the issue, it’s money flow vs capacity to produce.

There isn’t a fixed amount of stuff and there certainly isn’t a fixed speed at which money can change hands.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#305

Post by johnnyanmac »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #139
apsec112 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since 2016, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have risen quickly for people in the bottom quartile, while for upper-income workers they've been stagnant. Obviously, most people on HN are still better off than manual laborers, but the gap has narrowed substantially (a big reversal from 1995-2015) and that's a good thing. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

I don't know if it's being done as a joke or what, but this is the exact sort of myopic focus on a single economic variable that is being criticized as failing to capture economic reality.

Yeah, we should be comparing spending power as a very slight upgrade to the metric of overall compensation.

And I'm not even sure what this graph is supposed to be showing. The biggest difference is when he 1st quartile stagnates while the 4th quartile loses 4-5%. 95% of $200,000 is still a lot more than even a 100% increase in salary for $40,000. my most generous, lazy interpretation of this chart shows a whopping $15% increase in wages for the first quartile.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#306

Post by nothercastle »

fallingknife wrote: post #214
nothercastle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true the maximum losses a private utility can generate for the public are unlimited because the losses always get nationalized. The 10% margin is after C suite grift so it’s likely more than 10% you can save. Plus if you are on the hook for losses might as well take the 10%

It will be paid out of tax money either way. To save me money the government would have to either: 1. run the operation at least 90% as cost effectively 2. be less likely to make major costly mistakes From my experience with government the probability of 1 is 0% and the probability of 2 is minimal. At least when PG&E caused those wildfires, their execs were fired and had to pay $100 million of their own personal mone…

The fact that they had 100 mil to pay speaks of the excesses salaries were paying them.

PGE isn’t really run any more efficiently than a government institution, at least with government there is some measure of transparency, though accountability is lacking for both situations.

Capitalism doesn’t drive efficiency when there is no competition, in fact the incentive for PGE is to drive up actual costs and then raise prices to maintain 10%. The more expensive and inefficient they are the larger the 10% bucket is.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#307

Post by User23 »

Animats wrote: post #211

Four. That's the magic number. There have to be four competitors of significant size before prices go down. There are both EU and US studies substantiating this. It's been seen in cellular phone networks, ISPs, drugstores, and banks. Drop below the threshold of four, and the magic happens. Prices go up, margins go up, and consumers lose. Four should be the basis of antitrust policy. Less than four, and there are two…

How then do you explain the Silicon Valley wage price fixing scandal? There were more than four players there.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#308

Post by rblatz »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #294
JKCalhoun wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like there was never a business model there then. Well, in a first world country anyway.

For my area in Los Angeles, it wasn't viable because everyone (or someone you know) has a car. a friend ride is much cheaper than an Uber. I only download the Uber app when I need to get to the airport and am leaving for weeks at a time. Any other time, I take myself, ask a friend, or even consider what remnants we have of public transportation (e.g. instead of taking a horribly expensive uber in/out of LAX, take a s…

That seems like a lot of effort, planning, and time to save $20.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#309

Post by nitwit005 »

WalterBright wrote: post #284
jmyeet wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking generally, not to you specifically, it seems like a ton of people see the problems created by capitalism and decide the solution is even more capitalism . I don't think there's a magical number of competitors that fixes things. We see an interesting phenomenon in commercial landlords where we have a ton of players but they all use the same software [1], which creates an effective monopoly even though it's no…

> It's just not feasible or economical to have 4+ broadband networks being built in an area Actually, it is. When telephone systems were invented, lots of telephone companies sprang up and ran wires everywhere. The barrier to this happening with broadband is regulation. Regulators work hard to ensure there is no broadband competition. > it seems like a ton of people see the problems created by capitalism and decide t…

That sort of industry gets regulated because letting people build multiple incompatible networks is an extremely expensive thing to do.

The railways often built incompatible tracks, signaling systems, and so forth, which was a problem nation's still struggle with.

Power companies created incompatible systems. Japan is famous for running on two incompatible electrical grids to this day.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#310

Post by johnnyanmac »

jurassic wrote: post #137
nequo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two Americas, the one that HN folks inhabit and the underclass. > The former is doing great. This is at odds with what I've been hearing on HN and in adjacent places. For a year or two now, people have been saying that finding a job in tech has become much harder. Some say that it hasn't been this bad in a decade. Some say it hasn't been this bad since the dotcom bubble burst.

A small percent of tech workers struggling to get a job doesn’t change the overall picture that most people working in tech are living relatively prosperous and comfortable lives. We are paid at a level that means we don’t feel stressed at the grocery store figuring out how to feed our kids or wonder how will we get to work when our cars break down. And as a bonus, we get to sit comfortably in air-conditioned rooms a…

>I and many people I know have gone through job searches over the last 18 months. Yes, it was more work than we’ve come to expect over the last 10 years. But ultimately everyone I know has landed on their feet. As an industry we are still incredibly privileged compared to most.

it's 50/50 in my circle. And I got the losing coin toss. Pretty much everyone in my circle got at least a threat of a lay off at some point except one person (and that company is in a very special situation). some got jobs quickly, to various levels of satisfaction. Some got laid off and then went back to the same company when they happened to secure a new project. I'd mostly prefer some stability over how well off I'll be when I'm 65. I'm not even sure I'll make it there at this rate.

>None of this is true for the “underclass” mentioned above who have little to look forward to each day

it's all relative, which is why this is hard to contain to a long term chart of "tech is still better off". No one wants to be caught off guard, doing interviews as a full time job for a year a income dwindles (so underselling it as "it's more work than we come to expect over the last 10 years" is underselling it). And even for the tech workers willing to work in the "underclass" jobs, it's not that much easier getting a job. Especially in my area that seems to have a higher than usual unemployment rate.

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